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March 2018

PANACEA

ProjectB is pleased to present Panacea,
the third solo show by the artist Hugo Wilson.

Hugo Wilson shows his personal world composed by ten oils and charcoals
of various sizes. The artist guides the viewer towards the breakage of mental
and interpretive schemes that habitually cage him by creating parallel
realities with a wide selection of sources such as, old masters, computer
games, images sourced from YouTube videos and many others to create his
incredible paintings.

The remedy - or rather the Panacea - that Wilson proposes in order to
free the viewer from the brain categorizations and provide an alternative key
to understand what surrounds us starts with the simple de-contextualization of
real subjects (Troop and Vanner). Wilson proposes his own
personal view going between figuration and abstraction to achieve the hyper
referentiality of works such as Last
Supper, Dancers and Damned while maintaining the structure
of the great masterpieces of art history that inspired them (Leonardo Da
Vinci’s Last Supper, Anthony Van
Dyck’s Venus asks Volcano the Weapons for
Aeneas and Peter Paul Rubens’ Last
Judgment). Hugo Wilson’s peculiar vocabulary is also made of bizarre canine
contests and scientific studies, such as in his Derby Mushroom painting, in which he depicts a fluorescent mushroom
contaminated by jellyfish DNA, or in Groomed,
that portrays an innocent poodle used as a living canvas for his owner’s
delight.

The artist plays with the viewers, challenging them on different
chessboards and relentlessly moving pawns; he confuses them, dismantling and
reassembling appearance and reality in a game of affirmation / negation aimed
at giving body to his personal artistic conception.

Wilson's ability to manipulate images and the viewer’s perception could
not be described with more pertinent expression than the one used with happy
intuition by one of his neighbours: “It is like God, but it isn’t".